Friday My Town Shoot-Out: Graffiti

The idea of the My Town Shoot Out is to post photos of your community every Friday, and hopefully improve your photography skills. This week's assignment was chosen by Ginger, from Brazil.

This summer I spent two weeks in Italy. I took a few pictures of street art there, mindful of the fact that "graffiti" comes from the Italian word graffiato, meaning "scratched," and has been around since the days of Pompeii. The Italian graffiti was a contrast to what I found last week in Corvallis:

In Italy there were occasional political comments. Metal garage doors were a target.

Another Italian garage door.

Any big wall was a likely spot for graffiti; this one was in Rome. I didn't see any graffiti scrawled on ancient artworks there, but any place else seemed to be vulnerable to taggers.

Florence, the mecca for Renaissance masterpieces, has a well-regarded art school. In front of it was an exhibit of graffiti, proving that there is acceptance of this as a modern day art form.

So, what about my own community, here in Corvallis Oregon?

As you can see from the clean wall of this building, located on a busy downtown street, we don't have very dedicated taggers here. In Italy this wall would likely be covered.

There is a walkway that goes beneath a bridge though, and here you might see a few things, almost always drawn in chalk. (Our taggers play it safe; nobody gets in trouble by drawing in chalk!) I do really like the painted stencils, like the little one in the upper left here.

See? It's cool, an improvement on the ugly concrete wall.

More chalk scribbles.

And another cool stencil, which I didn't understand until after I stood back...

...and looked at it from a distance. It's part of a profile of a face.

Do you see the graffiti on this? It's kind of subtle.

Green paint has been rather carefully dripped beneath the arched sides of the concrete trash can.

There are two high schools in town, and they both have huge rocks on which students are encouraged to paint whatever they want, a sanctioned place to do this controversial art work, and a way to prevent vandalism in other public places. Looks like the class of 1990 paid a visit!

The teenagers around here don't leave very political messages, do they?